“Look who’s here,” Grandma said, opening the front door for me. “What a good surprise, but holy cow you smell like dead fish.”
“Occupational hazard,” I said. “Is my father here?”
“No. He’s out with the cab. It’s just me and your mother.”
I stripped down to my undies and handed my jeans and T-shirt to Grandma. “I’m going upstairs to take a shower. Throw these in the washing machine for me.”
I washed my hair twice and stood under the shower until the water turned cold.
“I left clothes for you on the bed in the spare room,” Grandma yelled through the door. “Lucky I had some new underwear.”
I toweled off and went in search of the clothes. There are three small bedrooms on the second floor of my parents’ house. One for my mom and dad. Grandma Mazur slept in what used to be my sister’s room. And the third used to be mine. It was left intact for a number of years after I moved out, but gradually it changed into the spare room and my things migrated to my apartment.
Grandma had laid out a bright yellow thong and matching yellow sports bra with the tags still attached. The mental picture of Grandma in the underwear wasn’t good, but I liked that she felt comfortable buying it and wearing it. She was a little shorter than me, and our flesh was arranged differently, but the thong and the bra fit just fine. The lavender and white silky running suit she left for me was a whole other matter. Good enough to get me through lunch, but I was praying my own clothes would be dry before I was ready to leave the house.
My mother had the table set by the time I came down. “I have tomato soup and lunch meat for a sandwich,” she said. “Or I can make you a grilled cheese.”
“Tomato soup and grilled cheese would be great,” I said.
“Me too,” Grandma said. “I want extra cheese.”
I sat at the table across from Grandma. “I need some help with the women who were murdered. When I discovered they all played Bingo I thought that might be the common interest that would lead me to the murderer, but I couldn’t single out a suspect at either game. There has to be something else the women had in common that they would come into contact with the murderer.”
“I didn’t know Melvina,” Grandma said. “I knew Bitsy Muddle, Lois Fratelli, and Rose Walchek. Poor Rose is going to be laid out tomorrow. I had to cancel a date so I could go. I heard you could see the cord marks on Rose’s neck. I hope they don’t get too covered up. I wouldn’t mind seeing something like that.”
“That’s gruesome,” my mother said.
“Maybe,” Grandma said, “but I got a natural scientific curiosity about those things. I bet I could have been one of them forensic people like on television.”
“Tell me about Rose,” I said to Grandma. “How well did you know her?”
“I guess I knew her pretty well,” Grandma said. “I saw her at Bingo, and I saw her at the beauty salon. And I saw her at the funeral parlor too. She liked to go to the afternoon viewings, because they weren’t so crowded.”
“Did she have a man friend?”
“She was seeing Barry Farver for a while, but he died. That’s the problem with dating the old geezers. That’s why I always say if you’re going to invest in a man you got to go young.”
“Gordon Krutch doesn’t look all that young.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty old, but he’s got a car. And Madelyn Krick went out with him, and she said he’s hot.”
My mother was at the stove, frying the grilled cheese. She wasn’t facing me, but I could feel her eyes rolling around in her head.
“Did she play cards? Did she belong to a book club? Did she take tap dancing lessons?” I asked Grandma.
“She liked the Jumble. She always had one of them Jumble books when she was at the beauty salon.”
“I knew Rose,” my mother said, bringing the sandwiches to the table. “She liked to cook. She went to all the cooking demonstrations at the kitchen store next to the liquor store.”
“That’s right,” Grandma said. “I forgot about that. Your mother and I go to some of them. They’re real good. You should go with us next time.”
I bit into my sandwich. “Are there men in the audience?”
“The times we were there it was almost half men,” Grandma said. “The demonstrations are early Saturday morning, and it’s a good location between the liquor store and the supermarket.”
“Did any of the other victims attend the cooking demonstrations?”
“We don’t go every week,” Grandma said. “Bitsy was there once when they were doing crêpes Suzette. Bitsy liked her booze.”
“What about Lois?” I asked. “Did she go to the cooking demonstrations?”
“I never saw her there,” Grandma said. “But I saw her in the liquor store that was next to it. It’s an excellent liquor store. Your mother and me get all our hooch there.”
“Anything else about Lois?”
“She lived a block from here, but we didn’t see her much,” Grandma said. “Sometimes we’d see her at mass.”
I finished my soup and sandwich and took my clothes out of the washing machine. They still smelled like fish, so I ran them through a second time and dumped in some bleach.
“I have to get back to work,” I said. “I’ll stop by later for my clothes.”
“Come for dinner,” my mother said. “I’m making stuffed shells, and there’s chocolate cake for dessert.”
“Sounds good.” Hard to pass up stuffed shells and chocolate cake.
I rumbled off to my apartment, changed my clothes, and turned my laptop on. I plugged the four murdered women into a basic search program and printed out a page on each of them. Address, credit history, litigation, relatives, work history. Mostly I cared about the addresses and the relatives. I was sure I was duplicating police efforts, but Ranger wanted me to snoop, so I was snooping.
Melvina had lived in a garden apartment in Hamilton Township. She’d had a couple low-limit credit cards. No work history. No litigation. Besides her son, Ruppert, there was a daughter who lived in Chicago. Melvina had survived her husband and her two siblings.
Lois Fratelli had lived in the Burg. I knew the house. It was small and tidy. Single family. She’d had several credit cards. No litigation. She’d worked as office manager for the family plumbing business for thirty-two years. Nothing recent. She was survived by about a hundred and forty Fratellis, all of them living in the Burg.
Rose Walchek had a similar profile. Widowed. Lived in a small row house on Stanton Street. Worked at the button factory for fifteen years. Nothing recent. No children.
Bitsy Muddle had lived in a small retirement complex behind the strip mall containing the supermarket and liquor store. She’d worked as a bank teller for twenty-seven years, she’d operated a boxing machine at a sanitary products plant for eleven years, and she’d been a cashier at WalMart for five years. She’d never married.
I found none of this information inspiring. Truth is, I wasn’t exactly an ace detective. I mostly found people through dumb luck and perseverance. Catching them was an even sketchier experience.
I looked out my living room window at the parking lot and didn’t see any thugs lurking in shadows, or sitting behind the wheel of their big black cars, so I shoved the printouts into my messenger bag and headed out.
Lula was sitting at Connie’s desk when I walked in. Connie was missing in action.
“Vinnie’s at his Perverts Anonymous meeting,” Lula said, “so Connie had to go downtown to write bond on some idiot.”
“Do we know the idiot?”
Lula shook her head. “It’s a new idiot.”
“Did anything exciting happen while I was gone?”
“You mean like Sunny coming here and turning himself in?”
“Did he do that?”
“No.”
“Too bad. I hate to say it out loud, but I’m spooked over Sunny. I kept waking up last night, thinking I was falling. Getting pitched off a bridge is freaking scary. An
d it wasn’t any fun being locked in the trunk of the car, either.”
“I hear you. Personally, I think those guys have been watching too much violence on television. They been seeing too many reruns of The Sopranos. Their behavior is disturbing. I’m even thinking twice about going over to check on Kevin. I haven’t given him any lettuce today. ’Course I’m not sure he was the one eating the lettuce anyways. It might have just been the homeless fool. I mean, who eats lettuce like that? He didn’t have no Thousand Island dressing or nothing.”
“I’ve been thinking maybe I should talk to Joe’s mother about Uncle Sunny.”
“What? Are you nuts? She doesn’t like you to begin with. And she’s probably got Bella there. She’ll send her out after you like a junkyard dog.”
“Sunny kills people. How can they not understand that?”
“They probably think he only kills bad people. Like people who don’t pay their protection money.”
“That’s wrong.”
“Yeah, but that’s your standards. You should live in my neighborhood. People get killed if they’re wearing the wrong deodorant. Only thing good I can say is people in my ’hood don’t drop people off a bridge. You know you’re gonna get knifed or shot in my neighborhood.”
“That must make you rest a lot easier.”
“At least I don’t have to worry about my hair looking like crap when I meet my maker.”
I dropped the body receipt for Mary Treetrunk on Connie’s desk. “Make sure Connie sees this. I’m going to do a drive-around and check out the dead women’s neighborhoods. And then I’m going to my parents’ house for dinner.”
“No Bingo tonight?”
“I’m taking a night off from Bingo.”
I was taking a night off from Bingo because I was going to get Ranger to help me snag Uncle Sunny.
THIRTEEN
BY THE TIME I got to my parents’ house I had a raging headache from riding around in my mufflerless car.
“I knew you were here,” Grandma said, opening the front door for me. “We could hear you coming a mile away.”
“I’m going to have to borrow Uncle Sandor’s car until I get mine fixed,” I said. “I can’t take the noise.”
“No problem. It’s in the garage. It’s all filled up with gas and ready to go.”
My Great Uncle Sandor handed his 1953 powder blue and white Buick Roadmaster over to my Grandma Mazur when he went into the nursing home. He’s since died, and the monster car now lives at my parents’ house, available for use as a loaner. It gets about three miles to a gallon. It drives like a refrigerator on wheels. And it does nothing for my self-esteem. On the plus side: It’s free and it’s invincible.
My father was in his chair in the living room, watching television. He’s retired from the post office and now drives a cab part-time. He has a few regulars that he drives to the train station every morning and picks up every evening, and the rest of the day he drives the cab to his lodge and plays cards with “the boys.” He used to keep a shotgun in the house for protection, but we had to get rid of it for fear he’d shoot Grandma in a gonzo moment of berserk frustration.
I passed through the dining room on my way to the kitchen and noticed that the table was set for five.
“Who’s coming to dinner?” I asked. “There’s an extra place setting.”
The doorbell chimed and Grandma scurried off to get the door.
“Stephanie,” my mother called. “Come get the shells. They’re ready to go. And there’s antipasto.”
I draped my bag over the back of a kitchen chair and reached for the antipasto platter. “Who’s coming to dinner?”
“No one special. Just someone I ran into today.”
I stopped in the middle of the kitchen. “Who?”
“Randy Berger. And don’t you dare go out the back door.”
“Randy Berger the butcher?”
“He’s not the butcher anymore. He owns the deli now. And he’s still looking for someone to take over the meat counter. It could be a good job for you. You could get a regular paycheck, and no one would shoot at you or drop you off a bridge. And Randy is single. Who knows what could happen? He could turn out to be the one.”
“I found the one. I’m almost engaged to Morelli.”
Problem was I hadn’t just found the one… I’d found the two.
Grandma came into the kitchen with Randy Berger in tow. Berger was a giant. He was 6’ 3” and built like someone who ate four double pork chops in a single sitting. He had thinning sandy blond hair and a face permanently flushed from freezer burn and peach schnapps.
“It’s real nice of you to invite me to dinner,” Randy said to my mother, handing her a large chunk of meat wrapped in white butcher’s paper. “I brought you a little something.”
“My goodness,” my mother said, reading the label. “It’s a tenderloin.”
“I just got it in,” Randy said. “It’s corn-fed, and it’s got real good marbling. I know everybody’s always talking about grass-fed beef, but if you ask me it’s shoe leather. Give me a cow that’s been shoved into a pen with a thousand other cows and forced to eat grain, and I’ll show you a darn good pot roast.”
“I guess you know a lot about meat,” Grandma said to Randy.
“It’s been my life,” Randy said. “Except now that I own the deli I have to expand my horizons.”
My mother put the meat into the fridge, and pushed everyone into the dining room.
“Frank,” she said to my father. “Come to the table. We’re ready to eat. Did you meet Randy?”
My father took his seat and looked over at Randy. “You’re the butcher.”
“I am,” Randy said. “And proud of it. Except now I’m also the store owner.”
“No kidding? I guess you must have done okay as a butcher to be able to buy the store.”
My mother passed the shells to my father. “You see, Stephanie,” she said, “you can make good money as a butcher.”
“I’m willing to pay top dollar to get the right person,” Randy said.
“What’s going on?” my father asked. “Is Stephanie taking a job as a butcher? Will we get a discount?”
“We already got a tenderloin from Randy,” my mother said.
“Yeah, and it was a big one too,” Grandma said.
My father shoveled shells onto his plate and passed the casserole dish to me. “I like tenderloin,” he said, looking down the table for the red sauce.
My mother jumped on the red sauce and passed it with the antipasto to my father.
“There’s a ricotta cheese filling in the shells,” my mother said to Randy. “But there’s good capicola and roast beef from your store with the antipasto.”
“Glad to hear it,” Randy said. “There should be meat with every meal. Without meat there’s no meal, am I right?”
“I like this boy,” my father said. “He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
“How do you feel about bacon?” Grandma asked.
“Bacon makes everything better,” Randy said. “Personally, I don’t like my bacon too crispy. I like to see some pink in the meat and some nice white fat glistening up at me.”
“Stephanie won a slow cooker at Bingo,” Grandma said. “She’s thinking about taking up cooking.”
“If you stop by the meat counter I’ll fix you up with just the right thing,” Randy said to me. “Some nice beef cubes, or maybe some chicken thighs. And if you want to try it out we could put a butcher’s apron on you and get you over to the carving station and let you butcher your own chicken.”
“Would she get to use one of them big cleavers?” Grandma asked.
“Sure,” Randy said. “She can use whatever she wants. If she comes to work for me she’ll even have access to the meat grinders and the power saw for when we get the whole side of beef in. I got a power saw that makes slicing through a steer’s thighbone child’s play. And she can make blood sausage and chopped liver.”
“It sounds like a r
eal exciting job,” Grandma said.
“I can’t wait to get to work every day,” Randy said. “It’s always something new. One day you get sheep brains, and then the next day it’s cow tongue.” He turned to me. “Have you ever had tongue? It’s a real delicacy. I like it when it’s sliced thin, but I know some people stew it up.”
I had half a shell in my mouth, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to swallow it. I’d had a decent amount of tongue over the years, but I hadn’t sliced or stewed any of it. I took a sip of wine and hoped the shell would slide down and not come back up.
“I’m not actually interested in the butcher job,” I said to Randy. “I’m not good with meat and poultry.”
He nodded. “It takes a special person. It’s a calling.”
“She’s a darn good bounty hunter, though,” Grandma said. “And she’s investigating about the murdered women who got thrown into Dumpsters.”
Randy forked in some shells. “I knew all those women. They shopped at my deli.”
“I would have thought they’d shop locally. Rose Walchek lived by the button factory on the other side of town. And Melvina lived in Hamilton Township.”
“They all belonged to the Senior Discount Club,” Randy said. “They got special deals at a handful of stores.”
“What were the other stores?”
“The liquor store at the Woodley Mall. The gas station on the corner of Hamilton and Bryant. Morton’s Bakery. There were some other stores, too, but I can’t remember them all.”
“How come I don’t know about this?” Grandma said. “I’m a senior.”
Randy spooned red sauce over his shells. “It’s part of the wellness program at the Senior Center. You have to be signed up for the wellness program.”
“I don’t go to the Senior Center much,” Grandma said. “I get depressed looking at all those old people.”
Isn’t it strange how life works? Here I was thinking I was paying a steep price for shells and chocolate cake, and then out of nowhere this nugget of information got dropped into my lap. All the women belonged to the Senior Discount Club. I knew there was a chance it’d be another dead end, but it felt meaningful. It was as if God had sent me Randy Berger. I smiled at him, and he broke out in a sweat.